The Book

Lighthouses for Kids brings to life an era when rivers, lakes, and oceans were the nation’s highways and lighthouses served as traffic signals and maps. Whether you're a kid who wants to discover the history and science of lighthouses or a kid at heart looking for a lighthouse resource, this book is for you. Enjoy a sneak peek at the first few pages of the book below:

Chapter One: Growing Up at a Lighthouse True Stories of Keepers' Kids

Eight-year-old Philmore Wass searched
the shoreline as he scurried to the outhouse
on a cold December morning in
1925. Low-lying fog on Maine’s Libby Island
kept him from seeing far. He could barely
make out the shape of tall stakes that looked
like fence posts sticking out of the water.
Puzzled, he ran back to the house and
grabbed the spyglass that hung over the
kitchen table. The magnifier revealed what
his eyes could not see: the broken masts of a
sailing ship. The ship must have wrecked the
previous night when howling winds had kept
him awake.

Young Philmore Wass (right), shown here when he was eight
years old, moved to Maine’s Libby Island in 1919 when he
was two years old. His father was the head keeper of the
Libby Island Lighthouse. Courtesy of Philmore B. Wass.

Philmore had seen shipwrecks before
near this island where his father was a lighthouse
keeper. Right now, Dad was on the
mainland with Philmore’s older brother.
Mrs. Wass called the nearby Coast Guard
station to tell them about the tragedy. The
Wass family was lucky to have a telephone.
Not all homes—and certainly not all lighthouses—
had one in the 1920s. The Wass’s
phone worked using an underground cable
that often went out in bad storms. On this
day, it was working, and Philmore’s mother
was relieved to learn that the ship’s crew
had been rescued.

The lighthouse keeper’s son could not
wait for the fog to lift so that he could
see what had happened. How big was the
ship? What cargo had it been carrying?
What kind of damage had it endured?
Philmore remembered an earlier shipwreck
near rocky Libby Island. He had been sad to
see a majestic ship destroyed by the unpredictable
force of the sea. After the fog lifted,
Philmore realized the ship must have been
heading to one of New England’s many
paper mills. Cords of wood floated on the
water, turning it a whitish-brown color.

Philmore, his sister Nonie, and her
friend went outside to explore. They walked
the length of snow-covered Libby Island to
reach the sandbar separating it from its
neighboring island, “Big Libby.” As they
drew closer, they noticed that two of the
ship’s three masts were still connected to
the deck, but leaned at an odd angle. The
rigging, or ropes that supported the sails,
swung back and forth in the wind. The
ship’s shredded sails hung from cords of
wood. “It was difficult to comprehend that
the wind and the seas, combined with the
destructive power of Libby’s Ledges, could so
totally destroy a ship of this size and
strength in a few hours,” he wrote.

When the tide went out, the children
waded across the bar to the wreck. “Feeling
like midgets, we stood near the hull and
looked up at the largest man-made structure
we had ever seen,” Philmore recalled. The
three managed to reach the stern, or rear, of
the John C. Myers and climb aboard. Dishes,
food, even furniture, had been hurled about.
The odor of large chunks of salt pork floating
in the water made Philmore’s stomach
flip-flop. Like others who lived along the
coast at the time, the keeper’s son knew that
once a ship was totally wrecked, anyone
could salvage what was left. The search for
souvenirs began.
Soon he spotted a beautiful black
mahogany box.

Purchase the book or visit your local library to find out what happened!